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Saturday, May 17, 2014

Cuba's Black Hole

The Spaceship USS Cygnus in The Black Hole



If you have never seen the film The Black Hole, I shall let Wikipedia synopsize it for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Hole
The Black Hole is a 1979 American science fiction film directed by Gary Nelson for Walt Disney Productions...

Nearing the end of a long mission exploring deep space, the spacecraft USS Palomino is returning to Earth...

The Palomino crew discover a black hole in space with a spaceship nearby, somehow defying the hole's massive gravitational pull. The ship is identified as the long-lost USS Cygnus... The Palomino...  manages to move back to the Cygnus and finds itself able to dock to what initially appears to be an abandoned vessel.

The Palomino crew warily boards the Cygnus and soon encounter the ship's commander, Dr. Hans Reinhardt, a brilliant scientist. Aided by a crew of faceless, black-robed android drones and his sinister looking robot Maximilian, Reinhardt explains that he has lived all alone on the Cygnus for years....

 Dr. Reinhardt and his Robot, Maximilian

Reinhardt then reveals that he has spent the past 20 years studying the black hole and intends to fly the Cygnus through it...

The rest of the Palomino crew grow suspicious of the faceless drones' human-like behaviour: [one of the Palomino crew] sees a [drone] limping and [another] witnesses a [drone] funeral and discovers the Cygnus crew's personal items in the ship's living quarters...  a battered early model robot... explains that the faceless drones are in fact the human crew, who mutinied when Reinhardt refused to return to Earth and had been lobotomized and "reprogrammed" by Reinhardt to serve him...


 Dr. Reinhardt's "Drones"

When I first saw the film, I thought the drones were zombie-like creatures, who although dead, were kept functioning in some ghastly  science-techno-"there are things man was not meant to know"- manner,  which would have made the film even more gross. Not to say the film was entirely disturbing: Slim Pickens did the voice of the loveable little good robot, and there was an uncommon mixture of horror and slapstick.


Now we turn to this:



Al Jazeera America
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2014/05/us-stops-force-feeding-guantanamo-inmate-20145172313714654.html
A US judge has ordered the military to stop force-feeding a hunger-striking prisoner at Guantanamo Bay naval base.
The temporary order, issued on Friday by Judge Gladys Kessler, means that staff at the facility cannot feed Syrian prisoner Abu Wa'el Dhiab until a hearing next Wednesday.
"While the Department follows the law and only applies enteral feeding in order to preserve life, we will, of course, comply with the judge's order here," Defense Department spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Todd Breasseale said in response to the ruling.
Kessler also ordered the US military to stop taking Dhiab out his cell if he refused to go to feedings and said the government had to keep all videotape evidence of forcible cell removal and force-feeding until the hearing.
It is the first time a judge has ordered an end to force-feeding of a prisoner in Guantanamo...

It seems to me that the government does not know what to do with the people in Guantanamo, yet will not part with them, nor put them on trial.

It will not even let them die.

Perhaps we can look forward to zombie drones in Gitmo in the near future.

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